Rainmen ready for stretch run

The parade of new faces into the Halifax Rainmen locker-room is all but over.

Now the question that remains is whether the cast assembled by owner Andre Levingston will turn out to be a National Basketball League of Canada title contender or an also-ran.

“Right now, we’re just playing really, really inconsistently,” Levingston said Tuesday of his 10-12 squad.

“We’ve just gotta pull it together. When you look at the rest of the teams in the league and look at what we have, we have a really talented team that can beat anybody on any given night.”

With the holiday acquisitions of point guard Trayvon Lathan, power forward Malcolm White and shooting guard Cedric Moodie, Halifax can add only one more player before the league’s Feb. 22 deadline.

It was purely coincidental that the Rainmen jogged onto the Metro Centre hardwood for Saturday’s game against London with new patches bearing their last names sewn to the backs of their jerseys.

But after fairly constant turnover during the season’s first half, it was also a timely indication that the roster shuffling had pretty much come to an end.

With the dust settled, only four players — Joey Haywood, Tyler Richards, Quincy Okolie and Hillary Haley — remain from the first day of training camp. Just one of the five starters in the Nov. 2 season opener (Haley) is still on the active roster.

That’s not unusual, though, in Halifax. A year ago, the Rainmen also had only four players go the distance from camp to the end of the season. Five of the top six in the playoff rotation arrived after the 2011-12 campaign began.

The difference, of course, is that those Rainmen were 16-6 after 22 games and on their way to the NBL final.

The 2012-13 version is tied for third place in the four-team Atlantic Division, albeit only three games behind the front-running Summerside Storm.

Five NBL teams will qualify for the playoffs in mid-March. The top three automatically earn semifinal berths while the No. 4 and 5 seeds square off in a best-of-three quarter-final, with the winner advancing.

Levingston admits the Rainmen aren’t where he expected them to be going into the second half, with a mediocre 7-5 mark at home and a 3-7 slate on the road.

“We have to start putting a string of (wins) together ’cause it’s gonna come down to a game here or there who’s gonna be in and who’s gonna be out,” he said.

“I really like our team. We just have to toughen up and be ready to play and be focused and I think we can make a run at it.”

RAINDROPS: Backup centre Okolie (concussion) won’t play Thursday in Saint John but could return next week after a favourable assessment Tuesday. The team is still awaiting FIBA clearance to activate Moodie for game action.